995 Comments

Autogynephilia is not common among natal females. See:

https://rdcu.be/cYMuV

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aleh

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umm i just want to be a part of the experiment so im putting out a general query of mine

So yeah we know blackholes exist right and they are quite litterally a rupture in space time due to gravity we also know that blackholes can move like the one at the centre of our galaxy.

My question is at the singularity where time and space change positions how does the blackhole move if its not in the space like giving a hypothetical for a stone to move in a room it has to be in the room right we can say the even horizon moves alr but how do we know if the singularity which has no space or is not in space can move through our space

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Can anyone recommend a good autobiographical graphic novel about being an angry lonesome unpopular geek in high school?

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What is "a thought" anyway? What do people mean when they say "a thought", or when they say they have "no thoughts"? I have always considered anything that goes on in one's conscious mind to be "a thought" or "thoughts", but then I was very puzzled by the exchange between a woman and a monk quoted in the last article:

'“How long has it been since you were last lost in thought?”

“I haven’t had any thoughts for over a week,” the woman replied.'

Clearly *something* is going on in her conscious mind (and that of the monk, for that matter) for her to be able to even register that someone is asking a question, and give a reply. But everyone seems totally fine with the implied idea that some conscious thinking process is happening, which, however, is not made up of "thoughts".

Is "a thought" only meant to refer to a verbalized thought, i.e. something which is said by the internal narrator and heard by whatever listens to the internal narrator? Are people calling themselves enlightened just because they learned to stop verbalizing all their thoughts? Are people who don't verbalize their thoughts automatically more enlightened without even trying?

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Nov 13, 2022·edited Nov 13, 2022

This landed in my inbox a few days ago, but I'm only getting around to it now:

https://www.clearerthinking.org/

https://programs.clearerthinking.org/worlds_biggest_problems_quiz.html

"Learn about the biggest problems facing humanity with our new World's Biggest Problems Quiz!

This new quiz will test your knowledge of three of the world’s biggest problems. We chose these issues because they are relatively large, neglected, and solvable:

• Global health - e.g. how many children die every year from malaria?

• Animal welfare - e.g. how many chickens are killed for meat every year?

• Existential risk - e.g. how many nuclear weapons are there in the world?"

I did terribly on all three quizzes which I should hang my head on, given all the information on these topics on this very Substack. Shows how much attention I pay, I suppose!

The thing is, I don't agree that "how many chickens are killed for meat every year?" *is* one of "the world's greatest problems facing humanity". That "What percent of global agricultural land is used for farmed animals? 75% (Our World in Data)" is interesting and is arguably a problem that needs to be solved (we should be using this land not to support animals but to grow crops for humans, discuss).

But do I care that 70 billion chickens are killed for meat every year? No, I do not. You can get me on "conditions the birds are kept in" but not on "will end up as tasty Sunday roast on your table".

"Are there more overall neurons in the human or fish populations?

Correct Answer: Fish outweigh human neurons by ∼16x (William MacAskill What We Owe The Future (p. 271))"

Yes, and? What are those fish doing with all those neurons as against what we are doing with ours? If I'm only sixteen times smarter than a fish, maybe that makes me very dumb, but I'm still sixteen times smarter than a fish. Or at least, by weight we have sixteen times fewer, but we also have a lot fewer fins, scales, swim bladders and the like. Do I care about that deficiency, either?

Now if there were a duelling Human Collective Unconsciousness versus a Piscine Collective Unconsciousness, then I might care (because then there would be hive-mind intelligence and the sixteen times outweighing *would* be a real difference that made a real difference), but in that case my patriotic duty to my species would mean I should Eat More Fish.

This raw number on neurons is meaningless; is this supposed to make me care that fish are intelligent or sapient or have feeeelings like the Disney movie about Finding Nemo? You could rustle up an incubator-full of neurons in a lab that outdid a given weight of "human in their brains" neurons, but it wouldn't mean anything, because that would just be a load of tissue in petri dishes versus organised brains in an entire organism doing something.

This kind of feel-good emotional blackmail (think about the cluck-clucks! think about the little fishies!) is the kind of thing that doesn't work on me and makes me think less of EA type projects.

Or at least, that websites like this are, for rationalists, the equivalent of all those "what is your inner goddess?" quizzes online; fun time-wasting entertainment, but ultimately pointless.

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Ambitious course names, anyone? My alma mater has an astronomy course named "Introduction to the Universe."

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Security as a service for school shooters.

I realize this is an incredibly sensitive topic, so I just want to acknowledge that school shooting is a terrible tragedy, every time it inevitably occurs. Also, I am going to be treating school shootings in a somewhat flippant way. Just know that this comes from a place of semi-panicked hysteria as I think about how my own son might be shot someday when he’s just being a kid, out playing or learning with his friends.

So, my thinking is that schools take out an insurance policy and as part of the protection they get a bimonthly security audit on behalf of the policyholder. This auditor would have two functions, first as said, to study any risks at an individual school and how they might be mitigated. Because these ‘risks’ are as likely as not to be the children themselves, this role is really more of a counsellor, specializing in very troubled children. He might speak with several of them throughout a given day at the schools on his rounds

Any districts with a higher proportion of seriously troubled youths who might require attention would certainly have to pay higher premiums. I think a single auditor could cover a territory of ~40 individual schools in month, an average of ~2 audits a day every school day

The second function is if one of those terrible/inevitable tragedies should occur, then the auditor, who is also a highly trained security agent, would be capable and mandated to respond immediately to the shooter, and stop them, with deadly force if necessary. Since they probably won’t be at the school when the shooting begins they wouldn’t be able to respond as soon as someone permanently based at the school, but then they also wouldn’t be a first target for the shooter.

Something about this feels like it should be featured in an grungy dystopian as one of the more heavy handed metaphors, but yeah I’m seriously forced to think about shit like this and I really dislike that

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Democrats have clinched the Senate and will probably get 51 seats in the end.

6 races will decide the House. Dems need 4 and Rs need 3. California carrying Dems. Not a single Pacific coast district controlled by Republicans.

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Nov 13, 2022·edited Nov 13, 2022

Those following the FTX/SBF crisis may be interested in this feature article about Sam Bankman-Fried, and what he was trying to do. It appeared on Sequoia's website, and was later taken down, but is still available on the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/

"The point was this: When SBF multiplied out the billions of dollars a year a successful crypto-trading exchange could throw off by his self-assessed 20 percent chance of successfully building one, the number was still huge. That’s the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you’d trade an asset, there’s only one way forward: You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one—because, in one (but just one) alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other, parallel, universes and compensate the failson SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy, or perhaps even selfish—but it’s not. It’s math. It follows from the principle of risk-neutrality."

I think we should consider that all of this may in some sense have been part of the plan. SBF was quite comfortable with risk, including really big risks. And he certainly wasn't the sort of man to be restrained by convention or any sort of deontological notion of right and wrong. He was a diehard consequentialist. Maybe this is just what it looks like when a really big bet fails.

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A close friend of mine has scoliosis. She has chronic pain now. She also deals with ADHD and her pre-diabetes is getting worse. She quit her super successful career as it all got to be too much. She's sort of in a funk due to the chronic pain.

What is the way out for her?

She sees a physiotherapist 3 times a week and has added acupuncture.

I wish I could help but don't know how to. She lives in the bay area in California.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

She has a family too, so they get her energy and attention and she has nothing left after that. I'd like to see her get out of the chronic pain and feel better. The pain used to be intermittent but seems more constant now.

Thank you.

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A Poem for S.B.F.

~ and a place to add your own verse of wit! ~

An Ode to the Venerable Sir Scam Bankrun-Fraud, the elder:

Have you heard the name renowned?

A phrase we say

To allay sway

Of FUDster, huckster-clowns?

Scam Bankrun-Fraud!

Scam Bankrun-Fraud:

Got Sequoia

On a gank,

Contumely -

Scam Bankrun-Fraud

Was Knighted by

Elizabeth,

posthumously!

Making ‘empty boxes’ money

Never seemed too grand,

Though Scam B.F.

And Derp Island

Had a plan at hand!

Scam proved G-2 Muons

Would sell a ten-percent-rate

In all the parallel multiverses

That he could contemplate!

A Ponzi tall as Babel,

For cryptoadies in the scrabble

In the dust of lust for risk -

Let’s drink a glass to his:

Scam Bankrun-Fraud!

Scam Bankrun-Fraud,

A million memers strong,

Scam Bankrun-Fraud, Scam Bankrun-Fraud,

A head of lettuce long!

Recite the Carol of the Age,

LARPer Dryads’ naively-brave

Incantation Coda:

“Better luck next time,

Robinhoodawouldacoulda!”

<reply with your own verses!>

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So, is it reasonable to assume SBF was a funder of the ACX grants? If so, does that mean this is the end of it?

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One common meme story yesterday was that Eli Lily's stock plunged because of a fake verified tweet. This makes no sense to me for multiple reasons -- (a) the tweet was on Thursday but the stock fell on Friday, well after people would've realized the tweet was fake; (b) if it fell due to the fake tweet, it should've already come back up unless it was some permanent PR damage or something (and why would it be?)

And yet this story's everywhere, I can't even find a skeptical take, and the stock did fall a notable amount. Is it possibly actually true? Or is it just that random stocks fall 5% every day, and so crappy websites post this funny idea and don't think twice?

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Has anyone experimented with Gwern's idea of cycling nicotine, caffeine, and modafinal, or some other cycle like that? The idea would be to enjoy the benefits of these without the tolerance. I've posted about caffeine tolerance before, and the idea of enjoying a coffee buzz without having to first take 3-4 off first is so desirable.

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There once was an n-type material

And a p-type, with carriers immaterial

They meet at a junction

And cancel their functions

In a manner that’s strangely venereal

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Amazing optical illusion I only just learned of, the Ames window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grQX7XRc6Tk (h/t Joshua Green)

The window looks like the large end is nearer to you, even when it isn't. So when the window is made to *spin*, it instead looks like it's oscillating. And then a pen is put through the window and the whole thing is spun -- so you see the pen spinning, but it still looks like the window is oscillating, even though this requires the pen to pass through the paper! I suggest taking a look...

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Is there a Bible on economically sustainable schools ?

Fostering, Adoption and boarding schools are huge expenses and cater to a growing demographic of adoption friendly & race agnostic careerists. The fast changing behaviors of this generation open a bunch of new opportunities.

Imagine a streamlined workflow from "orphanage -> adoption -> fostering -> boarding school -> introduction to labor force" for a small 3rd world town. Adopt a child, we take care of them for the school year, and you get to have them for the holidays. Your parents are happy to see their grand children on holidays, you get to be as much of the cool uncle as the parent, and we take care of everything from nannying, disciplining and education "YOUR" child. Since the funding goes to the school, it can be used to educate not just that one child, but also non-orphan poor children in the rest of the town. The teachers can be a bunch of 1st world retirees, empty nesters and yuppies in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Since the orphanage is still the legal guardian for many kids in the school, children can be pushed into the labor force at an earlier age. That way the orphans without the funding for university, can be trained for the trades by working the cafeteria as cooks, or building maintenance, carpentry or honestly, even white-collar trades like sales & marketing. Freshmen in universities everywhere in the US do it, how hard could it be for highschoolers to do it instead.

So the 3rd world school is the center of it all and children are the main 'commodity'. But you develop an entire retirement, spiritual retreat, local services & adoption industry around it.

I know there are like a million legal roadblocks to such a thing. And let's not ruin a good thing by talking about the ethics of it all.

But, has anyone tried a simple version of something like this ?

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Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022

I've been playing around with prediction markets recently (manifold). What strikes me as weird is that you're really aiming to guess what the consensus probability will be, as opposed to the resolution of the market, specially for markets that resolve on a scale of years. This is enabled by the market giving you frictionless ways of buying and selling your shares at any point in time.

It feels really weird when you make a serious long-term prediction, and then lose money because the market moves in the opposite direction. There's much more profit to be made in correctly anticipating market movements, than in actually being right about the underlying questions. I also suspect that you can make profits by abusing the publicly viewable order books in some way.

Manifold very prominently reports your daily profit/loss to you, which is supposed to be an indicator of your forecasting ability. But now that I've actually participated, I've updated towards considering this metric less informative.

I suppose these observations translate to real-money prediction markets as well. What's the alternative? forecasting tournaments?

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Did Scott anticipate the people who will post garbage intentionally due to this experiment?

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Is it true that quadcopter drones that today cost hundreds of dollars once cost tens of thousands of dollars? If yes, what caused the price decline?

The drones seem to only incorporate simple technology that was available in the 1960s.

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Meditators, is there, or could there be, such a thing as a "reverse" Jhana?

From my limited understanding, First Jhana makes people feel joy by suppressing their desires. Could I use the same techniques to inflame them? Dedicated Buddhists will probably say that's a bad idea and contrary to Enlightenment, but I'm seeking ways to increase my motivation. I have an easy time abstaining from harmful things but less success actively pursuing goals, so I don't think standard teachings will be right for me.

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First we hear Mr. Musk is laying off staff at Twitter, then he's not, then well actually he may retrain them, no maybe he'll lay them off, etc., etc.; now we hear tens of thousands may be laid off by Meta.

So, who are these engineers, what are their skill sets, and what did they do all day at Twitter and Meta? Who is likely to hire them? If and when they find new positions, will they be able to work remotely? I've always wondered who these techies are. I believe my niece instructs doctors on the use of her company's software, and her husbands flags legal citations for attorneys, but I imagine workers for large tech companies may be more specialized.

Any ideas?

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/14lrUDqrepFfvHy7z02Qah3B6HwMU0ZE05XFpj2lxBZg/edit?usp=sharing

Hello folks!

I am glad to announce the 10th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.

Saturday, 11/12/22, 2 pm

1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660

The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse

33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152

https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39

Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ

Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik+acxlw@gmail.com with questions or requests.

Activities (all activities are optional)

A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)

1) Ken Wilkenson on the harms of inequality

2) Levels of intensity in psychedelics

B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.

C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.

D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.

E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.

F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.

Conversation Starter Readings:

Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.

1) Inequality is more beneficial in developed countries than improved wealth. Professor Sir Richard Wilkinson.

KTLS18: Richard Wilkinson on Inequality - The Enemy Between Us

https://youtu.be/9mZfSxdpaMg

This is a quick summary that links to supporters and detractors.

https://revisesociology.com/2016/08/14/spirit-level-summary-wilkinson-pickett/

2) Psychedelic Levels of intensity

Provides a taxonomy of the types of psychedelic experience ranked by intensity and dosage

The 7 Levels of the Psychedelic Experience

https://youtu.be/UQRfTD6AXPs

https://effectindex.com/effects

If People want to return to previous weeks' topics, there is still ground to cover. I would like to discuss entropy further.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy

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Nov 11, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022

Imagine you live in a group house. You eat together, you clean together, you work together, you meditate together. Sometimes members from the group travel to another group house part of your network. Sometimes you are sent on an individual mission to go get a useful item from another group house which is a three week or three-month journey away. The key currency of your brotherhood is the gossip and stories from the other group houses. Everyone lives for the pastime of storytelling, and no night goes by without the swapping of a tale.

One member of the group house never travels, but always listens. He skips meals to sneak off and jot down some juicy stories. By midnight candle and by light of the moon he writes. This is my impression of Bede the Venerable.

Bede was an Anglo-Saxon, a monk, and a prolific writer and teacher. From a North Britain monastery, where he was put at the age of seven, he became the voice of all Britain. His voice carried across the channel to renew France. And this France kept the flame of learning despite the Viking onslaught which bloodied Bede’s once-majestic monastery.

Parlous the age. Parlous the waters. Parlous the journeys and the fraying threads of civilization. Today it is nearly effortless to keep knowledge alive. But in those days, a single book could cost something like $40,000. Imagine how that would affect all knowledge if the price of knowledge were so high.

In his book the Ecclesiastical History of the British People the British people become another Israel called by and calling out to God for salvation. The British are discovered first as slaves on the market on auction in the Forum. The future pope Gregory inquired where these white angelic faces fell from. He learned they were Angles from Deira whose king is called Aella. From these pagan roots, Gregory foresaw a hidden meaning. “Not Angles rather they are angels! Indeed, Deira for from De Ira of God they will be saved! And Aella is blessed for in naming their king they sing Alleluia!” The monkish puns and ironic monikers punctuate Bede’s work with a regularity as set as the Liturgical Hours.

Any way this how I understand English monasticism before it was destroyed in 793 by the Northmen.

What Bede would see in Astral Codex Ten, Aella, and Substack, I leave to the kabbalists among you.

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I am seeing no signs of culling!

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I've been reading different views on when distillation was invented. I have sources saying everywhere from the 9th century AD to the 5th millenium BCE (based on vessels recovered about 15 years ago on Cypress.)

It seems like a huge range. I'm deeply skeptical of the later dates and I'm curious if anyone has any insight.

Martin Levey and Maria Rosaria Belgiorno seem to be prime proponents for the very early development of distillation.

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*shrug* lets try to start an argument and see if I survive

I believe biotech and the possibility for bioterrorism, is more of a danger then any near term agi.

I don't think agi is likely to be soon; nn's are not general computation and generality will be a very hard problem.

1. Before we have general ai, I believe, we could have hacking narrow ai's, who are better at breaking out of technical boxes then understanding 3d space and human speech. This will be painful, and will probably break the current internet. But an internet after such an invention of such creatures isn't a forest of dead wood.

2. The human brain has several systems that appear well integrated. It seems to me intelligence is a collection of subsystems, for example alpha go intergrated nn's with min max trees. Either the alignment problem is solvable or it isnt; and how do you make subsystems "aligned" towards the same goal if its a hard problem? I expect that there will be a growing libary of good ideas that we slowly learn to smoosh together in ways that are useful, there will be family's of narrow ais that are super human is several niches for when you can push 2 ideas together, when theres maybe 100 subsystems to integrate to mimik the human brain

3. ai and fusion are 30 years away says guy who makes money on ai and fusion

And bio-terrorism is coming:

1. gain of function research, locked the world for 2 (going on 3) years and it appears to be by accident ; the technology to implement this is "lock sick animals in cages near other animals" (maybe humanized mice)

2. cisper

3. anti-human enverimentalists exist and were cheering that co2 went down during the lock downs

4. mental illness and isolation is increasing

5. The mrna technology is a way to manufacture proteins in basically any host that can survive it. If anything people wanted it to produce less product for vaccines. Why would humans be the best hosts? There are simpler life like worms you can cut into 1/8ths and get 8 individuals, or mold and plants. While the animal kindom has several nasty toxins waiting to be pulled at. Couldnt you use mrna to produce a toxic that happens to be toxic to animals with brains but not one of these simple creatures and just dose them repeatly and extensively with mrna and produce biological poisons without a traceable ingredient.

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While I was browsing Zillow, it struck me that a priori I would expect market incentives to tend to cause overproduction of the more-legible features of housing (size, yards, pretty pictures on zillow) at the expense of less legible features (walkability, nearby amenities, durability, community, accessibility, time-savings). It also struck me that low density imposes negative externalities on all your neighbors by making them travel farther to get from point A to point B, compared to the counterfactual where your low density lot didn't exist and everything had been built in different places accordingly. A Georgist land value tax could help internalize that externality and promote density.

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 11, 2022

Not sure if politics is allowed in this thread, but hopefully it'll be okay especially if I keep to the process-and-predictions side rather than object level stuff?

Going into the midterm it seemed to me that a lot of people (and prediction markets) were assuming that the 2016 and 2020 paradigm of polls significantly overestimating Democrats' share of the vote would continue, and even more cautious commenters (including me) thought there was a significant chance of that.

Now that we have at least the rough sketch of the results it seems like things were much more like 2018 than like 2016 or 2020- the polls were mostly right and if anything it was Republicans who underperformed. Prediction markets in particular did noticeably worse than 538.

What are people's thoughts here? A couple obvious potential explanations:

-Sample size just isn't very big. Sometimes the polls do better, sometimes they do worse.

-Trump being on the ballot adds unusual effects that the polls aren't good at accounting for- when he's running, he outperforms the polls, but that doesn't apply to midterms.

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A week or two back, someone told me that he had tried to buy one of my books from Amazon and it wasn't available. I searched for my books on Amazon and found that almost all the self-published books, including two that Scott reviewed in SSC, were missing. On further inquiry, I discovered that KDP, Amazon's self-publishing branch, had deleted my account. Their explanation, after I had made inquiries and asked to have the decision reversed, was:

" Upon further review, we are upholding our previous decision to terminate your account and remove all your books from sale on Amazon. Having multiple accounts is a violation of our Terms and Conditions, and we are confident that your account is related to an account that has already been terminated due to violations of our Content Guidelines. As a result, we will not be reinstating your account."

They have given me no explanation of in what sense my account is "related to" another account that had been terminated or what that other account was, despite my asking.

The obvious solution is to put the books up on another service — Lulu and Barnes and Noble have been recommended to me. That gets them back on Amazon in both print and ebook form and I intend to do that. But I remain puzzled about what is going on. My first theory was incompetence — that KDP simply made a mistake and was unwilling to take the trouble to find and correct it. The alternative is malice, probably ideological, by someone at KDP in a position to fudge up reasons for removing my account or, less plausibly, by someone outside KDP who found some way of making it look as though I was violating their rules.

If any of you have experience with competing services, let me know. So far I have had one recommendation on FB for Lulu, one for Barnes and Noble.

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

Consider the propositions:

1) Most people want to feel good about themselves.

2) Most are not really praiseworthy.

3) Some people are outright failures.

4) We have mass media that are capable of near-instantly communicating ideas between people.

Where do 1-4 lead you? For me, it seems to imply that many persistent or even popular ideas will be about cope. People who are outright failures will generate ideas to cope with their failures, while people in the bulk of the spectrum will generate ideas to cope with their mediocrity. Before mass media, most of the cope was probably for the people in 2 due to their large number, while after mass media the people in 3 started creating weird and persistent cope groups.

Examples of pre-mass media cope groups:

i) Christianity. Christianity maintains that the rich and powerful won't reach paradise after death, while the poor and innocent will easily be virtuous enough to gain entry to Heaven. Classic cope.

ii) Eastern religions with karma and reincarnation. Similar idea as above.

iii) National socialism. The Germans couldn't believe that the German Army had been defeated, not a single shot was fired on German land after all! It must have been the home front, a stab in the back! Very clearly cope.

New cope groups post-mass media:

i) MGTOW. Unsuccessful men trying to cope with their failed romantic lives by trying to convince themselves it's high-status to not be in a romantic relationship. Cope.

ii) Anti-natalism. People who are too lazy to form a family and have resorted to moralizing over small climate impacts or other weird stuff ("the world is too bad for me to want a child"). It's cope.

iii) "Fat acceptance". Do I even need to go on?

Weird other copes that I don't know how to categorize:

i) Liberal blank-slatism. High-skill and high-intelligence successful white collar workers who have been raised on the idea that success should be earned by hard work, so they refuse to believe in innate, unearned skills. Coping about their failure to work hard enough to earn their success, or something?

ii) Conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstrapsism. A weird less-common variant of the above where the person instead takes as a postulate that success IS earned by hard work, then copes with the fact that most people aren't successful by maintaining that they must simply be lazy.

What does ACX think?

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When exploring places on Google Maps satellite view (everyone does this, right?), I've noticed an odd phenomenon: snow-covered regions will frequently have really weird discoloration, typically green and/or pink, in a way that doesn't line up with anything I've seen in real life.

High-res example, moderate green color distortion: https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1641972,-168.5416009,1839a,35y,67.92h,1.71t/data=!3m1!1e3

Low-res extreme green/pink color distortion in the center of this image (goes away if you zoom in): https://www.google.com/maps/@54.5564273,-164.6284417,43088a,35y,90.83h/data=!3m1!1e3

Southern hemisphere example: https://www.google.com/maps/@-49.2470138,69.0636751,13366a,35y,90.83h/data=!3m1!1e3

Himalayan example in yellow: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.5948222,79.9878435,14941a,35y,90.83h/data=!3m1!1e3

My current best guess is that extremely white regions with the right angle of reflectivity onto the imaging satellite will get bright enough that some kind of RGB channel overflow thing happens? This would explain yellow (blue channel overflow) and magenta (green channel overflow) but not green, which I see frequently. Many of the green discolorations also don't seem like they're all that bright in general.

I'm confused. If anyone has theories or sources, I'd love to know about them!

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(Long) RE: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon (which I found from Vitalik Buterin's Twitter)

Once upon a time, a kingdom was tyrannized by flocks of predatory birds. Some species stood over ten feet tall and had hooked claws like scythes. Some species were clever and hunted methodically in packs. Some species had superior camouflage, nearly invisible until the moment it was too late. Some species were tiny, but dripped venom from their claws, so that the smallest scratch meant death. The birds could kill anyone, but most preferred weaker targets: the very young or the very old.

The misery inflicted by the vicious, hungry birds was incalculable. In addition to those who were gruesomely killed each day, there were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones. Victims of birds’ attacks who didn’t die were often left with painful scars.

People tried to fight the birds, of course. Priests and magicians called down curses, to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage, attacked them, but failed more often than not. Chemists concocted healing brews for scratched victims, but they died anyway. The birds were prolific and deadly, but not perfect, so many people were able to survive encounters with the less dangerous species before falling prey for the last time. Most people were able to find happiness, though: they coped mostly by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them. Anticipating that many of their children would be lost to the birds, people began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often spawned a dozen children. The human population was thus kept from shrinking, and the birds flourished.

Technological progress changed everything, though, as it is wont to do. The King’s master at arms developed a high precision crossbow. A smith developed a technique to cheaply produce swords and daggers. These weapons could kill many species of birds. For the first time, people felt like they had a chance.

One day, in court, the King declared a war on birds. “No society should live in fear as we do. It is an abomination that we have normalized this terrible scourge on humanity, this senseless grief and loss of life.” The people reacted with roaring cheers. People were ready to fight, to kill the birds that they knew would one day target their children, their parents, themselves.

The King proposed an unthinkably ambitious project: to wipe all birds from the face of the Earth forever. Humans would live without fear, would be able to go outside without watching their backs and wondering if it was their last day on Earth. No one would have to mourn their friends or siblings or parents or children. Each person in the Kingdom would be armed! Each would receive a house safe from the birds! And, most ambitiously: the King’s own chemist would be developing an antidote to the bird venom that had killed so many!

At this announcement, murmurs echoed throughout the hall. The venomous birds had been around forever. Anything and everything had been tried to spare their victims, but a scratch was always fatal. People started wondering if this was going too far, if the King’s project was a little too optimistic, an absurd waste of money. Loud grumblings started around the room, when suddenly a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The birds are bad!”

The boy’s parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the child. But the King said, “Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser than an old fool like me.”

At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the genuinely friendly smile on the King’s face and the outreached hand, he obediently took it and walked up to the podium. “Now, there’s a brave little man,” said the King. “Are you afraid of the birds?“

“I want my granny back,” said the boy.

“Did the venomous birds kill your granny?”

“Yes,” the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. “Granny promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then a bird scratched her and she got sick and… The birds are bad… I want my Granny back!”

At this point the child was crying so hard that the King had to return him to his parents. The child’s simple testimony had moved the room, and everyone in the King’s court felt a rejuvenated zest to fight, to win, to reclaim humanity and these simple experiences from the predators.

And so, over the next ten years, the Kingdom’s bureaucrats and weapons masters and chemists went to work. The King’s weapon masters churned out more spikes and swords, arming each person in the Kingdom. They educated villagers on the safest times to keep their children inside and safe from attacks, and relocated people living in the most dangerous areas. More children, those precious young lives, were saved than ever before–dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of blossoming souls who would have been confined to that senseless oblivion!

Miraculously, chemists developed antidotes to the poison birds’ venom, and for the first time, people could be scratched and live! Some victims were fine after taking the antidote, and returned to their lives as before. Some became tired after taking the antidote, and felt fatigue and spiky pains in their wrists and ankles. Some couldn’t walk more than a mile without feeling their head spinning and their hearts pumping after being saved. But they were alive, and the people rejoiced!

Emboldened by their new technology, the King’s men killed more and more birds. Attacks went down, and the people felt safer every day. They knew that they were defeating the birds. But the birds were not completely gone yet. The giant birds with the scythe-like claws rarely killed anyone, now that people rarely left home without their standard issue gear and weapons. But they could still injure, and many of the frail never recovered from their injuries. Safe from the birds, people lived longer than they ever had before, but in their old age they developed strange new pains and behaviors.

As the years passed and many species of bird were made extinct, it seemed as though the poison birds were only getting more common. They were small, and sneaky, and could hide almost anywhere: not even the King himself was safe. When scratched, some people would have to take the antidote once, twice–but usually after this you would have to take another antidote, stronger and stranger, that had curious and multiform effects: it left the victims deaf and their minds slow, it thinned out their skin so pressure sores formed on their arms and buttocks; ulcers formed on their mouths and food tasted strange to them. And sometimes the venom lingered; the chemists never knew when it was safe for someone to stop taking the antidote. Some people could not afford an antidote, and sometimes it did not work at all. People who had survived multiple attacks weren’t as strong as they were, and some became unable to work, to walk, to think, or even use the bathroom, until their lives became a quiet constellation of experiencing their pain, their boredom, and simple pleasures like a ray of sunshine and a warm blanket.

MORAL: Let us not confuse treating death with treating aging, the former creates a Hell that is unthinkable for people who have no experience with nursing homes and ICUs.

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

If the CIA wants to plant a story in the NY Times, what's its exact mechanism of doing so? Does one of the editors get invited into a smoke-filled room where a shadowy man slides a briefcase full of cash and the exact text they want to appear in the newspaper, or does something more subtle happen?

If anyone knows of a Youtube clip of a movie or TV show that depicts the process accurately, post it.

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So I read Matt Levine's newsletter about the FTX thing, and I have a question.

The claim seems to be: "FTX loaned Alameda a bunch of customer assets and got back FTT in exchange." And now FTX has gone under, so Alameda doesn't have to pay back the loan.

But FTX and Alameda are owned by the same person, aren't they? So -- does this mean Alameda now gets to walk away with a big pile of FTX's customers' assets, while FTX goes under?

Is this legal?

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I've been attempting to be less introverted (not that there's anything wrong with it), but each day is a huge will-power fight against a strong instinct to go back into my shell. I've had limited success, but am interested to hear people's thoughts on why some of us are like this, how and if we can reliably overcome that instinct, or even if we should.

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I love absorbing information. But it seems like I only have a limited reservoir of attention (or something).

Basically, I find it very hard to read a book. My mind wanders *while I'm reading*. As-in I'm somehow reading the words in my head but thinking of something else and not absorbing anything what I'm reading. (I'm also bad at paying attention in meetings and was bad at staying attentive during lectures back in my school days.)

What kind of strategy can I use to help me focus? (I try caffeine -- but it's not clear if it helps.)

I've never been diagnosed with anything like ADHD -- but I also grew up in a time and place where such a thing didn't exist. I'd definitely prefer not to take any drugs (caffeine excepted :). This seems like the kind of place that might have good advice, so asking you all.

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How fragile is a cashless society? I was trying to purchase an iTunes movie on Apple TV a few days ago for the weekend movie, and was always declined. Logging in to banking app didn’t show my accounts, it showed an error. So, then and there at least, my money is gone. I was not alone - people out for the night found their card not working, one guy had to run home leaving his watch as collateral. The problem was a multiple hour outage at HSBC, a major U.K. retail bank.

It got me thinking about a potential attack that takes out major retail banks for days, or weeks. Not only would that cause major disruption during that time, millions would literally have no money, but the subsequent fall out would also be disaster. No doubt people would try to go back to a partly cash society by withdrawing enough money to survive subsequent outages, whether they were personally affected or not, causing multiple runs in the banks.

It seems to me we have introduced massive fragility here without much thought, just as the fragility of globalisation wasn’t fully realised until it broke and supply chains were disrupted.

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/hsbc-customers-unable-to-pay-for-meals-and-shopping-during-online-banking-outage-12738693

(Sky says it started at 10:30, it was about 8:40 when I noticed).

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

Does anyone know the details around the Warnock domestic violence accusations? I’ve poked around a bit, and hadn’t been able to find anything.

For those of you who aren’t inundated with Georgia campaign ads and think that I misspelled Walker, let me give the context. For the past couple of months, ads against Walker have been run, which say he “wanted to strangle employees,” “put a gun to his wife’s head,” “threatened a shootout with the police,” etc. There are a lot of quotes. Good odds that you’ve heard about these if you follow the news.

About maybe a month ago, a new strain of attack ads against Warnock (not Walker) started. They show a clip of police cam footage, in which his ex-wife accuses him of trying to back up his car over her. Besides that, very little context is given. It’s now a popular 10 second clip in a 30 second campaign ad, but that’s the only such accusation I’ve seen.

It seems to me that if this really happened in some objectively bad way, it would be more prominently featured in ads. At the same time, if it really didn’t happen, it would be slander/libel. I haven’t been able to find details on what actually happened, and was hoping someone else with more google-fu than me had figured it out. Thanks

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> I’ll be deleting any comments below a vague and shifting quality bar, probably around the 33rd to 50th percentile of the average ACX comment. ... I only let the highest-quality comments (according to my subjective judgment)

I'm perfectly fine with this method, but I think it'd be essential to have significantly more input from you Scott, as to what your subjective understanding of high quality vs. low quality is.

For example, the 'neg. comment, low content' issue you mentioned lately was helpful, more of this is needed. So: what is high quality for you? What are elements of low quality?

For context, I am aware of the '2 of necessary, true, and kind' approach.

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At the time of writing there are 423 comments. People are brave! I normally just lurk on the comments and post very, very rarely. The last time I posted anything substantive Scott mentioned it as one of the highlights (so proud!) only to dismiss my argument (so mortified!). Well it was about Easter so perhaps it was a case of 'Whereof only 10,000 words will do, thereof you must be silent'.

The only semi regular posting I do is to try to promote my podcast Subject to Change (https://pod.link/1436447503). I'm almost certain promotional efforts like this are against the spirit of the comments section so I only do it when I feel I have an episode I am really proud of or if I think the readers of the blog might find it particularly interesting. (Not least episodes with David Friedman, Battleship Bean and John Schilling - all well known to ACX).

Anyway as the challenge has been thrown out I thought I'd jot down some random and not very connected thoughts on my experience as a (very) amateur podcaster over the last few years in case it is of interest. (And if it is not of interest it will be zapped!)

1. My podcast is one where I interview interesting people who have written interesting books. This is the laziest kind of podcast. I am relying 0% on my own knowledge and charisma and 100% on that of my guests. There are no production values to speak of.

2. That said putting doing the podcast is a surprising amount of work. I like to edit out misspeaking and pauses and loud breaths and so on. If the guest spoke for an hour that usually takes me at least 3 hours to edit.

3. Getting guests is easier than I thought it would be. I can understand that because if I had spent three years writing a book I'd sure want to talk about it. On the other had the historian Niall Ferguson surely had a point when he said his son had advised against doing podcasts because then people wouldn't bother buying the book.

4. I don't think I have had any bad guests so far. Pretty much everyone has been good at speaking.

5. One thing I have learned is not to waste time on introductory chit chat. When I listen to a podcast I just want them to get on with it. If we haven't got on with it within a couple of minutes maximum I have failed. I finally worked that out after about 15 episodes. I wish I'd have worked it out sooner.

6. A mistake I keep making is forgetting that I know more than the audience. So when I ask a question I take the shared knowledge I have with the guest for granted. That then leads to an answer that excludes a large part of the audience. And I still don't know exactly how to get the episode to flow in a way that will work for the listener. Sometimes I feel I am really helping the episode flow along and sometimes the guest is a great speaker and my job is just to say 'Oh really!' from time to time. Edward Shawcross on the Last Emperor of Mexico was probably the most effortlessly entertaining speaker of all my shows (and such a good subject!) and really didn't need me there at all.

7. My podcast doesn't get all that many listeners. Between one to four thousand downloads depending on whether the guest is famous AND has a strong social media game.(My social media game is zero). And for most guests it is at the lower end of the scale.

8. That doesn't matter - it is a chance for me to speak to and learn from some of the brightest most interesting people on the planet. Well, interesting to me. It is an absolute privilege.

9. I get extremely nervous before doing an interview. I want a good show for selfish reasons but I also feel like if I don't do justice to the guest I have really let them down.

10. There is more history around than I realised. I thought I knew a fair bit of history but it turns out I knew practically nothing. I had no idea about the Portuguese rounding Africa and heading into the Indian Ocean. How could I not have known about this? It is one of the most consequential events of world history. I blame my school! Then there are the smaller stories like the wreck of the Batavia. A treasure ship and a psychopathic madman made for an amazing story that Russell Crowe is turning into a movie. It turns out history is full of these barely believable stories that I had absolutely no idea existed.

11. I said above I am not so fussed by my listener numbers. That is not true. I want to have lots more listeners! But I have no idea how to get them. And I have no idea if the number I do have is okay given that it is a simple interview show or if I could promote it more effectively to people who would enjoy it. And there are lots of other history podcasts out there and some of them are really, really good.

12. My podcasts are way too long. Often an hour and a quarter or longer. I have started trying to split the really long ones in two if it is possible. But I think my philosophy will continue to be that I want to do the topic justice rather than fit with listener needs. But I must admit if I saw a podcast on the fall of Constantinople that was an hour and a half I might pass quickly by. But it is one my best episodes!!!

13. When you interview an author about a book they wrote 5 years ago they will likely have forgotten a lot of it. I read the book a few days ago, they haven't thought about it in years.

14. Guests never, ever have decent microphones. There is nothing you can do about this.

15. Recording on two tracks (which you can only do remotely) is great. It means that when you try to interrupt and the guest sensibly ignores you then you can just silence your embarrassing attempt to say something.

16. And finally if any of you have some good ideas for guests who you think would be entertaining please let me have your suggestions. hogg.russell at gmail dot com The podcast is history mainly but some film stuff mixed in.

Scott has promised to remove low quality comments. So if he doesn't take this one down that is basically an endorsement. So please give my podcast a go! https://pod.link/1436447503

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This is an interesting experiment which could have a few benefits. Forcing people to be more thoughtful about their comments could create a more intellectually stimulating environment for discussion. Additionally, it may help to weed out some of the less constructive comments that can sometimes bog down a discussion. I'm curious to see how it plays out.

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founding

What are the current frontiers of research on the biology of depression? In particular, in the five years since Scott wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13/what-is-depression-anyway-the-synapse-hypothesis/, has there been any significant new evidence for or against the synaptogenesis hypothesis?

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Does Scott's audience contain any Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians or any other similar barbarians who'd be willing to answer my question: are "thoo" and "tha" used interchangeably, or do they follow the same rules as tu/vous, du/Sie, etc in other languages?

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Just came here to mention to scott an interesting study [ Ketanserin reverses the acute response to LSD in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study in healthy subjects ](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36342343/).

Here's the gist:

* ketanserin is a 5HT2A antagonist, it can however be used to stop an LSD acute effets *after* they started

* the level of BDNF is still increased by LSD even though no subjective effets were felt.

This to me seems like a step forward to triggering neurogenesis regularly without having to deal with the psychological impairement.

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

Since there has to be *some* comment of poor enough quality to get binned, in order for this experiment to work, let me step up.

Latest advertising email from a French perfumier whose scents I do like and sometimes buy. This one is for the gentlemen out there (though not confined to them):

"The ideal gift for the man who is looking for you, the one you are looking for; the one who loves you or whom you love; for a father, a brother, a friend, or for yourself. After all, perfume has always been gender-neutral."

Four writers, from Casanova to Ernest Hemingway, and I'll quote you the Hemingway one.

https://www.histoiresdeparfums.com/blogs/hdp-blog/four-leaf-masculinity

"1899 - ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Frenchest of American writers, Hemingway is one of the few to be equally revered on both sides of the Atlantic. An inveterate Parisian to the point of naming the bar at the Ritz after him, Hemingway was also known for his liberal drinking.

A great lover of rum, gin and champagne, he even invented the Papa Doble, replacing the dose of sugar with... a double dose of rum. A worthy heir to the opiated poets who made the great hours of French Romanticism, Hemingway is remembered as the embodiment of a right-bank intellectual epicureanism that is the antithesis of the Saint-Germain existentialism that today's authors claim as their own.

1899 emerges as a warm woody fragrance, free of treacly ambers without losing any of its generosity. Juniper and Bergamot echo gin and the mineral bubbles of the glasses of champagne that Hemingway swallowed during his interviews, then give way to a heart of cashmere-like Iris warmed by a voluptuous and sugar-free Orange Blossom, Papa Doble style.

Vanilla and Cinnamon underpin this heart in an old rum effect enhanced by a peaty whisky-like Vetiver, anchoring 1899 in the register of silky tobaccos; of a charming and irresistible sapiosexuality.

An image - Hemingway leaving the Ritz past midnight, the Place Vendôme covered in silent indigo, his wool and cashmere overcoat exhaling aromas of amber spirits, leather and vanilla-flavoured cigars."

Now this is teetering on, if not tumbled over into, pretentiousness but I like the way this guy weaves little stories around his scents and it is very French literary style. And who can resist having a go at "Saint-Germain existentialism", whatever that is when it's at home? It's a whole production around what are, to reduce it to the bones, a set of nice smells in little bottles.

If the description fascinates you, you can buy the four listed scents plus two others in a sample set:

https://www.histoiresdeparfums.com/products/for-him-discovery-set

Note: Unsolicited testimonial, no money or freebies changed hands for this.

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I recommend the latest episode of the Contemplative Science Podcast on Jhanas, an interview with Jhana researcher Jonas Mago (who studies under Karl Friston).

In the podcast, they described Jhanas through the lenses of predictive processing and active inference, discussed how research shows that Jhana experience is culturally dependent and mentioned an ongoing study of Jhana practitioners.

My takeaways from it were that Jhanas are actually studied in the academia both from neurological and sociological perspective, and we'll soon have even more published research discussing some of the same questions that were asked on this blog.

https://www.thecontemplativescientists.com/ (the latest episode isn't on the web yet, but you can find it in any podcast app)

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In a similar vein to your "challenge mode":

There is a well known German blogger, "fefe", an IT-security expert with a highly visited website:

https://blog.fefe.de/

While it is absolutely minimalistic, it has probably more hits than most news sites in Germany!

And part of the "minimalistic" thing is: There are no comments!

But for a while (about 2010-2014) another IT-expert (Linus Neumann) "copied" the website and made comments available. And it was basically a "social experiment". Comments there were not moderated in the slightest! You can guess, how that looked liked ...

_But_ then they changed something: They put CAPTCHAs in front of the comments/commenting. Also they basically added a "word filter" for slurs and hate. And if this filter saw some "wrong words" the CAPTCHA did get a chance of failing, even if it was correct. I don't remember the real percentiles, but if you used a slur, the CAPTCHA had a "50%" of failing. And "the more the merrier", it gets more and more complicated to get a message through. Some people were quite presistant to get their terrible comment through and tried it 10+ times :D

All of this was disclosed in a talk (German):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG4FawUtYPA

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What are the most plausible examples of politicians actually playing 4-D chess?

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This is nsfw and culture-war-adjacent, so please skip if that's not your thing.

I've recently come across the term 'autogynephilia', meaning roughly sexual arousal because of feeling and appearing female or feminine. I believe this was originally intended to refer to men with crossdressing kinks, but seems to be usually used these days in reference to trans women, implying that they are not really women but men who fetishize femininity.

I'm a cisgender woman and that argument seems wrong to me. In popular culture, and confirmed by many of my cis female friends, many cis women have something very similar to autogynephilia. Wearing lingerie that exaggerates feminine features like your hips is very common and many women seem to find it sexually exciting; similarly, some people like to see themselves in mirrors etc. 'Feeling like a woman' links to many arousing emotions/states of mind, such as feeling desirable, feeling weak or submissive, and feeling that you’re taken care of.

Is there something I’m missing here? If any amab people experience autogynephilia, does it seem like what I’m describing above?

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Does anyone have good strategies on doing the personality/management type questions when applying to mechanical engineering internships. Having completed and been rejected from a few (they are among the most soul sucking things I've ever done) I get the sense they are looking for utmost rule following, snitching, and conformism in every sense. Am I correct here?

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Any thoughts on the Nevada 'Top Five ranked choice' ballot initiative?

Seems to me like an excellent way to break up the two political mega-tribes into groups too small to contemplate civil war or permanent minority rule.

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I'll be interested to see if the comments reach the goal of "nicer, politer, higher effort" but fail harder on the goal of "interesting and good in the way that organic comments from a relatively smart commenter community often are". I think there might end up being an effect where everyone is eager to prove they can play with the big kids, and we get a larger amount of small kids trying to prove themselves as a result.

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

After reading SSC and then ACX for a few months I got major cognitive dissonance from learning that Scott favours libertarianism. Personally it seems just as likely to result in dystopia as communism, since people are just seen as cogs in the machine in both cases. Has Scott ever given a detailed argument for favouring libertarianism?

Update: Thank you all for the clarifications! It seems Scott doesn't unconditionally support what I thought was the central theorem of libertarianism, that unregulated market forces is the path to paradise.

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Scott, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that you're reading this Open Thread more carefully to specifically recommend to you a book: How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barret.

https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/

I'm making this recommendation in a bit of a rush: I haven't finished reading the book yet, and I haven't yet read your "Can People Be Honestly Wrong About Their Own Experiences?" article, but the brief skim of part of that article, plus what I have seen you write about Jhanas, and what I've read of the book so far, suggests this might help fill in a missing piece of the model you seem to be trying to build. (Assuming the psychological science in the book holds up, I'm not an expert in this area.)

My layman's understanding of the gist of the book is that it argues that people don't all feel emotions in the same way: they might have drastically different bodily sensations and brain activity patterns that they decide to label with something like "anger" or "happiness" for the purpose of communicating between people. And that we take into account context a lot when "constructing" these emotional labels.

Worth a book review maybe? It's an interesting hypothesis at least, and it could be good to get another opinion as to whether it's a solid one or not.

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A tag filter like lobste.rs story filters would be fantastic for open-ended discussions like this, to exclude whichever subject threads (crypto, AI, meditation, meta, what have you) I'm just not interested in. In this case in particular it would be really useful to exclude all the meta.

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I remember when the forum Sufficient Velocity did something akin to Challenge Mode, it didn't work very well. I'm slightly more optimistic about this case, both because of the basic nature of the commentariat and more obviously, because while Scott has repeated the SV admin's step of asking for criticism of the "delete low-quality comments" area *in* the "delete low-quality comments" area, I don't think he's going to delete 90% of the criticism as "low-quality" the way said SV admin did (this is, um, not a good way to make a project succeed).

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For a while I have not been receiving notifications related to comments on this Substack, but I do receive notifications regarding comments on other Substacks. Does anyone know why this might be and how to rectify it? Thanks!

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I’m reading The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan. A central argument is that America will stop policing the ocean / shipping lanes, and global trade will collapse to regional trade and there will be lots of pirates and state-backed piracy (of things like oil and bauxite).

I feel like I missed the part about why America is going to stop policing the oceans. He goes on and on about how the US Navy is 6-10x as strong as all other navies, but not why we would stop.

Is anyone else reading this or familiar with these arguments?

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In the last few years there has been a flurry of research on this and on hyperphantasia, the opposite condition.

I’ve devised a “virtual Stroop test” for those who want to try:

Imagine someone using a red marker to write the word “blue” on a whiteboard. Easy for some to imagine, challenging for many and impossible for a few. Some people report seeing purple!

Recently discovered that someone with intense olfactory imagery (think involuntarily smelling toasted baguette) was able to halt the imagery by holding her nose closed.

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I'm trying to see if anyone knows a way to look up really obscure songs. I've had a fragment of a song stuck in my head for about twenty (five?) years now. I heard it once on satellite radio while driving through Western Canada/Upper Western United States, and I'm pretty sure the radio announcer said it was "amateur hour" when they played it. I remember a facsimile of the main beat, and the tune and lyrics of a single line of the chorus, which hasn't show up in Google searches.

I figure at the very worst it's probably got copyright somewhere, but I don't know which country it would be in. I might be able to talk myself into combing through that if someone knows where I would even look.

(This is assuredly the content Scott was hoping for for Challenge Mode.)

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Some musings on FTX and EA. My parents started a non-profit in India that builds healthcare and physical infrastructure in poor government schools since 2013. They've also partnered with an ex-IIT professor for the past five years on a talent search-nurture program in my hometown.

I happened on the FTX Future Fund earlier this year. Long-story short, we are running a much larger program that identifies top performing rural students (15-16yrs) in logical reasoning and STEM ability in Northern Karnataka with an annual family income <$2000. We provide them with tabs+internet and connect them with top teachers and well-connected mentors, the latter of whom will support their future college tuition. Based on the reception so far, it seems likely we have raised aspirations+increased probabilities of the students having careers with larger impacts for their families and communities.

Granted the FTX situation is still evolving, but it does seem somewhat likely that the money in the Future Fund was not sourced ethically. Possibly, tons of people will lose a bunch of money they invested through FTX.

I'm not how accurate of an equivalency this is — the money helping bright rural kids comes from 'defrauding' innocent crypto investors. Even if such is true, I'm unsure of whether it's still in some sense ethical - seems true in the classic EA utilitarian sense but not in a deontological framework. I vaguely recall an EA vibe-shift that changed people's priors on earning to give, where being a top executive from *insert evil big consulting company* so as to give away million stopped being the recommended choice. Anyways, this doesn't affect any material decisions but curious to know what folks think.

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Here’s an interesting dinner conversation:

Ask people to imagine a bicycle.

Then quiz them on what they “see” - you’ll be amazed by the diversity of response, from a detailed picture of a specific bicycle against a known remembered background to nothing - no images. I’m in the latter camp having only a few bytes of fleeting visual memory.

Ask where the image is located - for some it is in the back of their head, for others it is floating in front of them. For those, ask if it interferes with their image of the real world and watch their puzzled expression.

Recently it’s been found that most people when asked to imagine a bright light will dilate their pupils. Those with aphantasia (no pictures in head) do not.

Any other aphantasiacs here? Only a few percent of the population. Think of all the gigabytes of brain storage that can be dedicated to other stuff!

People assume that others think like they do. Most aphantasiacs are astounded to find out that they are different from the rest of the world.

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Curious about this experiment. My expectation is that average comment quality increases, but variance goes down.

The seen may be better comments on average and fewer terrible ones, but the unseen may be fewer potentially high-quality comments from low-confidence people because a) there's a chance the comment will get deleted so there's a lower EV of posting, and b) that person with low-confidence will not want to risk getting their confidence lowered any further.

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This is kind of a random/open-ended question, but- is the arms/defense/weapons industry basically the most technologically sophisticated industry, or at least in the top 3? I've noticed that a small number of countries dominate global arms sales- some of them like the US and Russia have strong militaries, but I notice that Germany consistently pops up as a major international arms dealer, despite having a fairly weak military. Germany seems to produce a large array of missiles, rockets, and tanks that are sold all over the globe, and of course they're famous as being a major industrial power- just not a major military one. I've also noticed Norway and Sweden appear to have a very sophisticated arms industry, and while they do have a military tradition, they're absolutely tiny countries- but are quite wealthy and technologically sophisticated. Norway has been making a number of the rockets used in Ukraine, and I recently learned that for a time the missile defense system that protected Washington DC was actually manufactured by a Norwegian company!

So- is the arms industry a function of a country's technological/engineering sophistication, and *not* a function of how strong or prominent the home country's military is? Is making rockets, missiles, tanks, warships etc. *more* challenging or sophisticated than manufacturing say laptops, home appliances, automobiles, cell phones, electronics, and so on?

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A Modest Proposition

Winner-take-all voting systems, like in the US, naturally produce two parties that roughly evenly divide the national vote. Forms of media that emerged in recent decades, like cable TV, talk radio, and social media, give people more choice to absorb news the way they want, and lead people to self-segregate into echo chambers and vote for more polarized politicians, driving these two parties further apart and making it harder for them to compromise and thus pass laws. Citizens are frustrated by this deadlock. One way to reduce it may be to introduce national propositions so that we can directly vote on laws, like many cities, counties, and states already do.

Why would voting directly on issues be any more successful than voting indirectly, by electing our Congressional representatives? As citizens, we have diverse views, but to elect representatives in a two-party system, all these views on a huge range of issues must be sorted, often arbitrarily, into just two boxes. It’s not just squeezing a square peg into a round hole; it’s putting a hypercube with hundreds of dimensions into a dot. An analogy would be a supermarket that offered only two choices: a basket on the left or one on the right. If you want cabbage and cashews, but don’t want kiwis and cookies, tough luck; cabbage and cookies are in one basket, and cashews and kiwis are in the other.

There are issues that majorities of citizens agree on and want action on, but which aren’t acted on because of the representative system. Voting directly on these issues would get things done that majorities want, relieving some of our frustration. Another benefit of offloading some of the contentious issues from Congress would be to reduce pressure on representatives and perhaps let them relax their adversarial stance and cooperate more to get bills passed.

Propositions aren't radical. Many local and state governments in the US already use them, as does Switzerland, which is pretty conservative, stable, and successful.

Another way to reduce political polarization may be for politicians to pledge to simply represent constituents’ views by polling them on major bills or issues. This might be done by an app on which the representative would ask constituents how they should vote on each pending bill. Two potential problems are too much or too little participation: by people either trying to stuff the ballot box or people not responding. I don’t know much about internet security, but I suppose there are technical ways to verify participants. On the other hand, if few constituents express their view, particularly on minor issues, that could be dealt with either by simply following the views of whoever responds, or by actively polling constituents to get a more representative sample, or by the politician trying to predict what constituents would want.

This pledge seems bizarre compared to our current tradition, where politicians declare their platforms, and voters choose between two. But if we compare with the relationship between employees and employers, the current political tradition seems strange. Typically, employees don’t declare what they’ll do if they’re hired, take-it-or-leave-it as one fixed package; rather, they generally do what employers want—either asking what to do for major issues or predicting what employers want on minor issues. Why not shift to such a tradition for our elected representatives, who are our employees in government?

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

I ran across the website of Sapien Labs, which says (https://sapienlabs.org/about-us):

<QUOTE>

OUR FOUNDING STORY

In 2014 our founder Dr. Tara Thiagarajan, a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford, was running a microfinance company called Madura that was working across 25,000 villages and small towns in India. ... A large field team gathered data on ecosystem and individual level variables to identify those that predicted the economic success of both individuals and entire villages. …

One Saturday they recorded a few minutes of resting brain activity [EEG] from themselves and some friends and colleagues and then drove a couple hours on Sunday to a small village where they spent the entire day recording brain activity from any willing adults. ... The brain activity from the village brains was very distinct from the urban brains. The differences could be several fold, and in some cases distributions between the two groups barely overlapped.

</QUOTE>

Their postings, which are mostly on biorxiv (not peer-reviewed, which is why I don't call them publications), include the following:

<PAPER SUMMARY>

Complexity of EEG Reflects Socioeconomic Context and Geofootprint

Dhanya Parameshwaran and Tara C. Thiagarajan, 2017

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/125872v1

This paper looked at EEG studies of 402 adults from 48 locations in Tamil Nadu, an Indian state, ranging from small villages with no electricity or motor transport, to large modern cities. Subjects ranged in income from $300 to $150,000/yr. The study concluded that their measure of EEG waveform complexity (based on correlations of different points in time of the EEG signal) showed that EEG complexity correlated very strongly with the "modernity" of the subject's hometown, and even more-strongly (r = .93) with performance on Raven's progressive matrices. That is (roughly), city folk had much more-complicated EEG signals and were much smarter.

</PAPER SUMMARY>

<PAPER SUMMARY>

Modernization, wealth and the emergence of strong alpha oscillations in the human EEG

Dhanya Parameshwaran, Tara C. Thiagarajan, 2019.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/125898v2

This is based on the same subject sample as the 2017 paper.

Its abstract says, "Oscillations in the alpha range (8-15 Hz) have been found to appear prominently in the EEG signal when people are awake with their eyes closed, and since their discovery have been considered a fundamental cerebral rhythm. ... It has been shown to bear positive relation to memory capacity, attention and a host of other cognitive outcomes. Here we show that this feature is largely undetected in the EEG of adults without post-primary education and access to modern technologies."

</PAPER SUMMARY>

Rural pre-modern people don't have alpha waves?! These claims are startling enough that we all should have heard of them if they're correct. I only skimmed these papers, but they look pretty good. And as far as I know, the authors are correct in their observation that no previous researchers have ever gone out to remote, poverty-stricken, uneducated and unmodernized villages to find subjects for EEG studies.

My first guess is that it's due to nutritional deficiency. Many poor rural areas of India suffered greatly from hunger in the past, and hunger during gestation or childhood has devastating, permanent effects on IQ.

My 2nd guess is that it's because the smart people left the little pre-industrial villages.

Any other opinions or guesses?

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Zvi's conflicted review of Marvel Snap actually convinced me to try it, and I love it, despite his criticisms being largely accurate. The card acquisition mechanic is truly terrible, but I don't honestly feel like it's out of greed, in particular. It's extremely difficult to get cards quickly, and impossible to target anything in particular that you want for a specific deck. But they've stated that the goal behind it is to try and keep people's collections somewhat unique, and if I view the acquisition process as a general strategy for keeping the game fresh, there are definitely some really clever ideas:

In particular, I'm really intrigued by your collection level increasing as a result of upgrading the cards. On its own, this is incredibly dull, but one of the criticisms the game regularly gets is the way each card has to have its own specific boosters to be upgraded. These boosters are primarily earned by playing the cards, and you get relatively more collection level points the first time you upgrade. In other words, they've developed a system that actively incentivizes you to play with every card in your collection. Every time I get a new card, I actively slot it into a deck to get enough boosters for its first upgrade. Regardless of whether it's any good, they've convinced me to at least give every card a chance. This is cool!

They didn't quite manage to kill off netdecking, but they did better than average. I see a lot of variety on the ladder. I think it also helps that they rotate the locations you have to win, which means the fundamental rules of how the game is played are in a constant state of flux. It's largely impossible for any one rock paper scissors to develop in an environment like this. I can see this actually being off-putting for a lot of players who like honing and developing a single archetype they can grind, but for me it's much more fun for every game to be a test of situational adaptability.

Zvi also mentioned how much he like the cube snapping, and frankly, I don't know if he went far enough. Between that gambling mechanic, and the very short games, laddering feels more like poker in some ways. Going up the ranks is not in any way about winning every game, the sky-high variance makes that impossible. Instead they've given players a way to assess their own confidence of victory, bet accordingly, and to fold when the opponent raises too aggressively.

In spite of all this progressing your collection still feels terrible. I don't know exactly what the solution to that is, because I like the philosophy behind it all, and I can see how it's all supposed to work, but somehow the way it's locked down still just doesn't feel good.

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Question for Scott: Is there going to be a collection of deleted posts kept/posted anywhere (anonymized, if appropriate) so folks can see what didn't make the grade and calibrate accordingly in future?

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One of my friends has a stats assignment where she needs to find an example of a bad graph with an accessible dataset so that she can make a better one. Anyone have any favorite (semi-recent) bad graphs?

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Yesterday someone posted on Twitter about traditional Burmese weight measures. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_units_of_measurement, you'll see that in the list of weight measures (which Burma/Myanmar is still using, although they plan to go metric)

1 mu = 2g (approximately, see wiki for exact numbers; I also took off the -tha counting suffix)

1 mat = 4g

1 nga-mu = 8g

So what exactly is the problem with 1 mu being 2 grams and 1 nga-mu being 8 grams? The problem is that "nga" means "five" in Burmese. And no, there's no other meaning of "nga" that applies here. The wiki notes this in a footnote - "literally five, but in fact is only four", but doesn't explain how this situation could arise.

How *could* something like this have happened?

Someone asked this on Twitter without an answer. I couldn't let it go, so, after several hours of reading and looking up what I could find about the historical measurement and monetary systems used in Burma (I must admit to knowing next to nothing about the country and literally nothing about the language and writing system), I have a theory. It's just a theory, mind you, because I didn't find a source that would outright say "this is why". But I find it convincing and pleasant. So, here goes. Your last chance to try and guess any major ideas on your own ends with the next paragraph.

I'll try to be brief, and I think numbering paragraphs might help with that:

1. Burma was independent for a long time, and was only conquered by the British in 1885, at which time they aligned their monetary system with colonial India. But the weird thing we're discussing was already evident as early as 1850s, when second-to-last Burmese king Mindon started minting coins for the first time in Burmese history. Coin collectors made sure lots of these survive and are catalogued and weighed. As an example, in this catalog https://en.numista.com/catalogue/myanmar-1.html

you can see that a silver 1-mu "Mindon Min" coin weighs ~1.5g, and a silver 5-mu coin weighs 4 times that, ~6g. Only the 5-mu coins are like that, other silver/gold coins seem sane.

2. Before coins, the Burmese used straight-up ingots of silver/gold for their monetary exchange, and they weighed them. Two interesting things about that which have nothing to do with the main problem: one is that a special class of weighers/assayers developed, and 2.5% of value was written down on each occasion (1.5% as payment to the assayer, 1% presumed wear&tear). Two, weighing was done by comparing to sets of standard weights which were animal-shaped, typically birds. These survive in large numbers from many past centuries and by weighing them we know which sets of standard weights had been used and how they changed with time.

3. The measures of weight were developed/used especially often for weighing gold and silver, so e.g. "1 mu" was both weight and monetary value (the context supplied, silver or gold, or it could be specified; typically an exchange rate of x16 or x17 between gold and silver was maintained), and the measures changed and developed according to monetary needs. The chief standard measure was in fact the silver kyat, which was equal to about 16g of silver, and more importantly for trade, at least in the 18th-19th centuries was kept equal to the Indian rupee; it was also known as the tical, and the British used this name most often. Interestingly, it used to be a lot less, 11g many centuries ago, and slowly rose in weight, as attested by the bird weights; it seems that kings found it useful to raise the tax income by very slightly upping the standard weight without changing the nominal burden).

4. Now given a kyat that's set at some fixed measure and in harmony with neighboring countries, you can build other measures up (2 kyat, 4 or 5, 8 or 10 etc.) or down (1/2, 1/4 or 1/5, 1/10 etc.). And it appears that, building down, both a binary system of 1/2 1/4 1/8 etc., and a decimal system of 1/2 1/5 1/10 etc. was in use in different eras in Burma (I find this alluded to in several sources but didn't find an authoritative list of which was used when). The binary system was influenced by India, and the decimal by China. Using the standard names for measures smaller than kyat, they went like this:

1 kyat = 4 mat = 8 mu = 16 pe = 64 pya (binary)

1 kyat = 5 mat = 10 mu = 20 pe = 80 pya (decimal)

5. We're set to introduce The Theory. At some older time, the decimal system was in use in which 1 mu was 1/10th a kyat. Then nga-mu, literally 5 mu, was half a kyat, and I suppose this could be an especially convenient unit of measure, used more widely and often than 1 mu itself. In time, the actual word "nga-mu" came to mean or at least strongly connote "half a kyat" in people's minds. Then later, perhaps in the 19th century, there was a reform to the binary system, and 1 mu was re-evaluated as 1/8th a kyat. The name "nga-mu" stuck by that time and it remained half a kyat, which now was, by weight, 4 mu. And that's how this came about.

6. A competing hypothesis would be that the decimal and the binary system were in use *at the same time* somehow. And wouldn't that be fascinating! But two arguments speak against that; first, the weights of the coins mentioned above. Second, the contemporary accounts of Englishmen travelling/trading in Burma in the 19th century - and there are quite a few - as well as dictionaries of measures, trading guides, etc. etc. nearly unanimously document a binary system: 2 mu = 1 mat, 4 mat = 1 kyat. I found one contrary source that seems to say "10 mu make up a kyat", as well as a definition of mu (မူး) on wiktionary.org that says "1/10th a kyat during the Konbaung era" - that's the era prior to the British conquest. But these are rare exceptions, and I want to explain them away by saying that if one didn't know about the discrepancy, one could wrongly "deduce" this from the 5-mu coin being half a kyat.

7. A strong affirmative piece of evidence, I think, is that the definition of "nga-mu" (ငါးမူး) in a Burmese-English dictionary, both wiktionary.org and a "real" one at http://www.sealang.net/burmese/dictionary.htm, gives several different meanings of "half of": not just half a kyat, but half an inch, half in acre, etc. This makes me think that literal "five mu" could in fact have developed towards a presumed meaning of "half a standard unit". But I didn't find a source that outright says that, or confirms my theory of the decimal->binary switch being responsible for this.

That's it! If you're an expert in historical Burmese monetary/weight systems or know one, I'd love to know what you/they think of this!

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founding
Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

I woke up Sunday morning so happy to finally be back on Standard Time. Since then, I keep reminding myself, “What a relief to be back to reality!”

If only we could drop DST, that would be the greatest. I’m very aware though that most of the country is in favor of permanent national DST. Sleep scientists seem to agree that that appears to be an unhealthy choice, but I can understand people wanting sunlight at the end of a workday.

I’m bummed to be in the distinct minority. I’ve thought about moving to Arizona. I don’t think my GF would join me so that’s out.

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I’m a Software engineer at a big tech company. I work remotely from a medium close of living area.

I am very social and meet very few programmers with similarly high compensation. In fact my job is viewed as exciting, unique and prestigious!

Am I smartly being a big fish in a small pound or lamely opting for complacently in the slow lane.?

In other words where do you fall on pushing yourself to achieve vs relaxing. I don’t buy that being maximally ambitious is optimal here.

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author
Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022Author

A common analysis of last night's election is that moderates have rebuked the GOP for running candidates who are too crazy, and the party needs to forsake (some extreme version of) Trumpism.

Is this a thing that can happen? Is there some sense in which there are some Republicans in a room somewhere who can say "We've been rebuked, let's start running more moderate candidates"? Or is it just that more extreme candidates can run, will win among primary voters, and nobody thinking of "the greater good of the party" has any way to stop it?

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Reading the Mahabharata right now and I’m struck by the similarity between Karna and Achilles. Both are born invulnerable (Achilles isn’t said to be so in the Iliad itself, but other additions to the mythos have it; Karna has his special earrings and armor). Both are also somewhat rude and coarse of manner—Karna is arrogant and boastful, and just consider Achilles’ behavior with Hector’s body. Both refuse to fight for a time on account of a feud with the supreme commander of their side’s forces (Agamemnon and Bhishma). And of course both are renowned chariot-fighting heroes who fight even harder after their near friends are slain (Patroclus and a whole bunch of kids and brothers) and have a legendary rivalry with a hero on the other side (Hector and Arjuna).

Are there any other mythic characters that fit this pattern or nearly so? Or are there any inquiries as to whether the legends of Karna and Achilles both stem from some even earlier proto-Indo-European source?

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Tyler Cowen often asks his guests if so-and-so is overrated or underrated. So I have to ask if anyone else finds Tyler Cowen really, really overrated. Some of us stuff is just annoying, like allowing for a thread on the election on your blog, but writing about it like this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/the-election-results.html The only reason people would want to discuss the results of an election is "mood affiliation" apparently. Maybe even more comically are his book reviews. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/07/rereading-catcher-in-the-rye.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/competition.html

If a teenager wrote like that I'd tell him that writing probably isn't in his future. I mean, maybe he's good as an economist but he gets credit as this polymath and I just don't see it.

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Thoughts on at-home ketamine-assisted therapy? Looks like with the COVID-inspired loosening of telemedicine, legal ket in the mail has become as easy to get as boner pills.

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It's time for a poetry challenge. Below are lines from five famous poems or songs, with each word reduced to its first letter. Your task: find the poems.

To avoid spoilers, I suggest posting any answers you give using ROT13: https://rot13.com/

1.

I H M T,

T S I I S F.

I F O T P,

T O T T R.

2.

G O O F, K O O,

L O O F-F B-L,

B W A H W H

D O P A P --

L G O H, B W U Y,

L W F -- L W F!

3.

B T S O G G,

B T S B-S-W,

A T D O H W,

I T P S M,

H S A W.

4.

I T T I S N S

A P A L A A T.

A T W H M I P

A T E S F B;

A T T L A G A D,

A L H L A T P;

5.

I F F T P B

B T C, R O R,

T M O P; A I T S

T L, S B S, F

S H A T G B.

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Paul Ingraham, who built the excellent site PainScience, now has a Substack blog called Try Everything, chronicling his efforts to recover from a post-viral syndrome he's suffered from for the past 7 years. So far nothing has worked, and he is planning to spend the next 2 years trying everything reasonable he or anyone else can come up with. He's smart, honest, articulate and funny, so the blog's a good read. Also gives you a miscellany of useful stuff Paul knows about what works and what does not for the vague but awful little symptoms that plague so many of us -- crappy sleep, fatigue, amotivational syndrome . . . The blog's comments section is also presents an opportunity to brainstorm possibilities. If you like the challenge of making remarks here that are 34th percentile or better in quality, you might try coming up with some ideas Paul thinks are worth trying. I managed to crank out 2, and felt like I'd found a golden egg. Plus Paul himself's a good egg. He's the only person who has ever given me a truly useful suggestion about reducing back pain.

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commit 28cb7c37ea187e7dac20f6ef1e146697e718b9d1 (HEAD -> master)

One of the only useful things I have imagined done on Bitcoin is publication of various checksums. With the collapse of FTX, I am less convinced that there will be a Bitcoin in ten years. Perhaps Scott's comment section will be longer-lasting.

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I just finished reading Reality+, and a couple weeks ago I read The Conscious Mind, both by David Chalmers. I enjoyed both greatly.

I'm stumped at the "seemingly brute fact" of subjective identity, that we each happen to occupy the particular subjective experience that we do. From The Conscious Mind, on page 85:

“The indexical fact expresses something very salient about the world as I find it: that David Chalmers is me. How could one explain this seemingly brute fact? ... The nature of the brute indexical is quite obscure, though, and it is most unclear how one might explain it. ... The indexical fact may have to be taken as primitive. If so, then we have a failure of reductive explanation distinct from and analogous to the failure with consciousness.”

I read Reality+ with the discussion above still fresh in my mind. In Chapter 15, Chalmers explores his intuitions about the circumstances in which he (i.e., the conscious, subjective experiencer writing the book) would survive, or not, in different cases of brain-uploading. He settled on the strategy that he would like to be uploaded gradually, given the option, to avoid being unintentionally killed and replaced with a digital doppelganger. Here's where I'm stumped: wouldn't continuity of consciousness in the course of any substrate change at all have to be arbitrary? In Chapter 15, Chalmers points out that the brain is undergoing gradual replacement all the time as part of normal biology. Why should there be any difference between that substrate change, through which presumably the subjective observer persists; and neuron-by-neuron digital uploading; and cortex-by-cortex silicon replacement; and hemisphere-by-hemisphere uploading; and complete cerebral annihilation and reconstruction; or what have you? What rule determines whether and where one persists?

Here's the best thought experiment I can come up with to make my point. Let's say we put you, the reader, under anesthesia, take out your brain and put it on life support, split it in half, and replace each missing hemisphere with a silicon duplicate, so that we now have two whole brains. Then, for the sake of isolating variables in the grisly experiment, we throw out your brainless body and install each brain in an identical host body, which we'll say are biological copies of the original. Then, we awaken both. Which set of eyes do "you" now see out of? Assuming the answer is not "neither" (because humans can survive a hemispherectomy), and not "both at once," then you must now inhabit one of the brains. Why one and not the other? Everettian quantum mechanics, which Chalmers discusses toward the end of his book, seems to beckon here, but I'll set that aside. I think any mechanism for making the choice would have to reflect some kind of "extraordinary discontinuity, unlike any other that we find in nature" (like certain alternatives to fading qualia that Chalmers takes up in Chapter 15 of Reality+). E.g., "you awaken completely in whichever brain includes the hemisphere with the greater number of neurons in it, and not at all in the other," or "you awaken completely in whichever brain includes the hemisphere that had the more powerful gasp of electrical activity prior to anesthesia, and not at all in the other."

What I'm getting at is that any determination of where a particular consciousness "goes" upon a substrate change of any magnitude must be arbitrary. It would even be arbitrary moment-to-moment in daily life: why should I still be here at time t+1, when my brain at t+0 was, atomically, in some ways a different thing? What if my brain's information-processing capability sufficient to correlate with consciousness is disabled by a knockout punch, or because I've taken a nap? What arbiter is choosing whether "I" should resume existence at t+1 when I get out of bed and my neural logic gates are all firing again? Maybe another way of saying all this is that the "brute indexical" does not just arise when we first blink into awareness, but it is continually reiterating itself.

It seems to me that, if any mechanism for determining continuity of experience would be arbitrary and extraordinarily discontinuous, and we are unwilling to accept such a thing, then we should accept that either: (1) no such mechanism is needed, because there cannot be continuity, because every substrate change does cause destruction of the previous experiencer, such that each experiencer only exists for a momentary flash, such that I am a different person now than the one who began writing this long sentence (notwithstanding the memories I inherited), and I will be gone and replaced with a new experiencer before I finish it; or (2) no such mechanism is needed, because there can only be continuity, because there is only one experiencer. I, the writer, am you, the reader, and we're both my dog, and each of the dinosaurs, and every fly that has ever landed on my window, and the alien AI on the other side of the galaxy. Experience is singular and omnipresent notwithstanding local expressions, just like a quantum field. There are many movies playing in this theater, but there's only one seat in the house.

Neither (1) nor (2) is very compatible with life as I'm living it. (2) would seem to unify egoism and altruism, which at the very least might motivate me to stop shooing away the stray cat. I have no idea what I'd do with (1). I could really use any guidance anyone can give me for further reading or thinking that might straighten me out.

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As soon as AI can interview a veteran claiming a mental disorder, determine the validity of the symptoms and aggregate the various domains of functionality affected by the disorder that approximates the VAs percentage rating system, half of what I do will become obsolete.

The forensic half of my practice will still be a thing for a while longer.

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Nov 10, 2022·edited Nov 10, 2022

Erik Hoel, winner of ACX book contest, has an interesting theory that the decline in the number of geniuses is a consequence of the decline in aristocratic tutoring [1]. Scott Alexander responded to Hoel's theory with his own article entitled "Contra Hoel On Aristocratic Tutoring" [2]. Alexander provides some examples of geniuses which he believes were not tutored (Newton, Mozart, Pasteur, Dickens, Edison), and attributes it to other causes such as good ideas being harder to find [3], and more distributed progress, as well as tall poppy syndrome. Hoel responds disputing Alexander's examples, and explaining that he does not believe it's monocausal [4].

Just recently, Hoel published an article (part III of the series), providing examples and elaborating on just how some geniuses were tutored [5]. I was interested in the question of how I can evaluate this theory. I asked Hoel, "If I took a sample from a list of geniuses of history, what proportion do you think would’ve received tutoring?" To which he responded:

"Depends on the era. It's also very difficult to find out, as there are a ton of edge cases. Looking at sources like Wikipedia isn't enough. Consider Newton: homeschooled until 12 (probably counts as tutoring), then from 12-17 in a more traditional school, but then he goes off to college where the entire system of higher education is run on tutoring. Does he count, or not? And so on. I'll also say that, from my reads, tutoring was so common it was often unremarkable, and sometimes, e.g., parents and relatives would act as tutors for one subject (like learning history with your aunt) - but it seems unlikely that such within-family tutoring leaves behind records except in the most detailed of cases."

I responded:

"I really appreciate your response. Thank you.

To me, it seems difficult to evaluate this theory by providing historical examples of examples that definitely count. On top of that, “Genius” is somewhat ambiguous and “aristocratic tutoring” seems somewhat ambiguous too.

I’m skeptical of the hypothesis and I’m interested in providing some confirmation or falsifying evidence. I’m a bit hesitant to update strongly on many examples. I think there are gains to be had from modern tutoring but the fade-out effect is so common, I’m skeptical of these sorts of hypotheses.

If you were able to run a sort of study to get confirmatory evidence, what would it look like? I think if 80%+ of geniuses were tutored, I would agree more but it’s hard to get a good assessment of the frequency.

Anyway, thanks for responding."

This leaves me wondering what disconfirming evidence could possibly look like. It doesn't seem fair to trade off examples without getting an overall frequency. Hoel acknowledges that some were not aristocratically tutored. Everyone acknowledges that some were.

I have taken the top 100 scientist entries from Murray's Human Accomplishment from 1400 - 1950 and started investigating their educational histories, but this merely gives a frequency of tutoring. I do think if it's low (~10%) this is evidence against. I suspect it will be high. I am being generous, for example I am counting Darwin's 40 hours of private tutoring from John Edmonstone despite it just being 40 hours.

But more importantly, how can I determine if it is a causal factor in the decline in geniuses? How could I empirically evaluate this hypothesis? Any research ideas? I'm very interested in this question. Thanks! [6]

[1] https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins

[2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/

[4] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring/comment/5668384

[5] https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-geniuses-used-to-be-raised

[6] Got the Murray idea from Sailer: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins/comment/5642066

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I recently found an AI-powered tool called ExplainPaper.com that lets you upload documents, highlight any word or phrase you don't know, and then have AI magic instantly generate a clear definition of the phrase. It's intended to to help you read academic papers, which isn't really a use case that interests me.

It makes me wonder if a general version of this tool is coming that will follow you around the internet everywhere you go and can define/look-up/comment on anything you highlight. That would be the killer tool.

Google has been quiet in the recent slurry of awesome AI tools coming out, so I wonder if this what they have coming. I am ignorant about these things and too lazy to research deeply, so I am hoping generous commenters will generously comment with information and/or theories.

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Does anyone have good resources on the treatment of long covid? Specifically respiratory issues and fatigue.

Most of the official guidance I've come across tends to be frustratingly vague, with the standard all purpose stuff on lifestyle changes support networks, etc. Presumably due to the broadness of long covid symptoms. And the unofficial advice in forums etc tends towards anecdotes and miracle supplements. Neither of which are particularly helpful in terms of concrete steps.

(I'm not sure where asking open ended questions comes in the hierarchy of comment quality, so feel free to delete and I'll repost on the normal open thread.)

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Trying a different version of this, because I think it has potential, but came late to the game last open thread and got bogged down.

~~Wegenerian Hypotheses Thread~~

From last time:

"Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")

This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.

This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!""

NEW RULES this time though: no vaguery (I'm looking at you, math guy), and no religion—nothing fully unfalsifiable. We are here to play the believing game, and feel out the implications of each other's ideas.

I'll start: Europa's interior ocean is full of life, and the orange streaks on the surface ice are roots that have cracked all the way through the shell.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/WTwtRFp8MXxMZUi7PcUZRA-1920-80.jpg.webp

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Here's a nice math puzzle to think about. Try to do it without pen & paper (but use them if you must).

Cities A and B are connected by a straight railroad 60 miles long. Trains in both directions depart at 00 minutes on each hour and move with a constant speed without stops, spending exactly 1 hour to get to the other city. Peter lives right next to the rail track and has a favorite activity to fight boredom, which he does randomly from time to time: he comes to the window, waits for the first train to pass by and writes down in which direction the train went.

When we inspected Peter's notes, it turned out that the two directions appeared equally often in his records. How far does Peter live from the nearest city?

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If you're optimizing for survival, you would post top-level threads rather than replies (to things that might get zapped), and you'd post 2-3 very different things so that the odds would be with you. If you're optimizing to avoid any lash of the whip, you'd just lurk. I predict more folks will be in the first camp--but we'll never be able to test this hypothesis because this comment is about to disappear.

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Preliminary results of the midterms seem to show better than expected results for democrats. In particular they seem to have systemically outperformed prediction markets, most notably in the senate (by contrast 538 seems to have been pretty close). Can we take any wider lessons about this for prediction markets?

538s predictions were public, so it's not a lack of information. One explanation would be that a single prediction market is analogous to an opinion poll, in collating the general opinion at the time. But not necessarily being more accurate. Though iterated markets might improve that. It also, loosely, seems thst more popular markets did worse. Which perhaps implies that the effectiveness of them reduces as you expand outside the small demographic of statistics nerds who engage in them most

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How similar would a system have to be to a human brain before you considered that maybe it had a similar level of sentience to a human being?

For example, if you found some system that you knew was mixing 'top down predictions' from a model and 'bottom up sense data' from the world to send instructions to some actuator that effects changes in the world, how likely do you think it is that this system thus has either consciousness or agency?

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Reinvention of the self, a conscious killing of one's old personality as a prerequisite for permanent weight loss. Layne Norton, in conversation with Andrew Huberman, on the Huberman Lab Podcast made it clear that he considers it basically essential for long term weight loss outcomes. It struck me really hard, in that it is a conclusion that I reached independently, having returned to an old way of being myself, after significant weight loss. It raises the possibility that mental factors, above all else, may dictate the success or failure of lasting weight loss and improved fitness.

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The collapse of FTX is seeing all the major coins tumble, and I haven't heard anyone talking about "web3" for what seems like a good while now. For those of you who have been involved in crypto-related projects this past year and half, how are you holding up? Has your opinion about the space changed at all? Are you going to try to stick it through this "crypto winter" or are you looking for a new career?

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founding

It started off as an experiment. Scott said he would Thanos the comment section with full bias, and the results were... Nothing short of spectacular. The greatest minds of our generation united by the desire to BE BETTER.

The surviving comments were glorious. They led to two Nobel prizes, one live enlightenment and at least four top-20 cryptocurrencies. The people whose comments got deleted... We don't talk about them anymore.

We could have left things there. At this perfect intellectual and cultural peak. But no, as always we had to take things to their logical conclusion. On January 1st, 2023, Scott posted an Open Thread in which the bottom 99% of comments were to be deleted.

It is 2065 now. I have cyborg cancer. I've been staring at the empty Open Thread for the better part of 4 decades, the perfect, pristine open comments section. Nobody has dared, nobody has tried, truly humanity has lost its desire for adventure and exploration.

And in that moment, I have an epiphany. As my dying movement, with perfect clarity, I reach for my USB 7.0 neural keyboard and slowly, painfully, type my dying word:

First.

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INB4 BANZZ!!

Just kidding. Sort of. Off the top of my head, I predict:

1. there will be more playful trolling than usual, to probe Scott's boundaries

2. there will be high-drama discussion around the experiment, with heavy speculation as to the deep psychology behind Scott's boundaries

3. there will be noticeably fewer comments than usual, because you'll only see the parts of the iceberg above the troll-line

4. whatever Scott decides, this will be a fun experiment to have had

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I’ve sat though a lot of leadership-building-style seminars and talks, and I feel like I’ve never gotten anything out of them. Usually everything is far too abstract to make any difference in my life practically. I feel like most leadership workshops are mostly a bunch of fancy-sounding jumbo jumbo. Has anyone ever been to one of these things that’s actually helped them be a better leader (or some other similar skill)?

Specifically, yesterday I went to a ~1 hour talk where the speaker’s thesis was “Leading is Selling,” and at the end of it, I still had no idea what point he was trying to convey or how to implement his ideas.

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I’d suspect it depends on what you mean. Are you talking about the overall quality of posts people *make*, or just the quality of the ones left behind?

There should be a knock-on effect where good comments get good replies, but that might not be a big effect—I have very little idea how that will change. But I’d be quite surprised if removing the bottom 50% of the distribution didn’t increase the average quality of comments *left behind* substantially.

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Is there a dunning kruger effect for values? Like- you value truth (or whatever) so you notice and are hyper aware of your truth related failings but if that isn’t an important value to you, you think, yeah, I’m truthful. Does this have a name?

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Predicting an equilibrium of below-average-quantity (including deleted posts) and roughly-average-quality comments.

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There’s been a lot of talk about abortion and where public opinion is on it. To me it seems clear that the median opinion is that there should be a 12 or 15 week ban with rape/incest/maternal mortality exceptions. It seems that public opinion thinks republicans want to ban all abortions and in many cases they are right, but not always. I posted the comment below on a different substack and I would be interested to hear what this audience thinks as it’s a pretty different subset of people:

People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. If you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.

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Scott, do you think that genetic engineering will be relevant, or do you think AGI is coming too soon for genetic engineering to really matter? I'm in the former camp, I am 80+% of no AGI by 2100. But maybe you're in the latter camp.

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On the deleting part ... I saw couple of twitter accounts with 'all twits are auto-deleted after N days'. Would it change your approach to writing?

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deletedNov 13, 2022·edited Nov 13, 2022
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